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From Memory to Skills: Evidence-Grounded Co-Evolution Governance for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Jul 2026 · arXiv.org · Vol abs/2607.16621 · 1 citation · 51 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

This paper proposes MSCE, a training-free Memory--Skill Co-Evolution framework that organizes agent experience into grounded step traces, reusable procedural policies, and declarative environmental cognition, and introduces reflection-weighted value backfilling.

Abstract

Existing memory systems for long-horizon LLM agents often retrieve prior traces as passive context rather than converting them into executable capabilities. In this paper, we propose MSCE, a training-free Memory--Skill Co-Evolution framework that organizes agent experience into grounded step traces, reusable procedural policies, and declarative environmental cognition. MSCE crystallizes evidence-backed L2 policies with positive estimated gain into callable skills that retain evidence links, applicability boundaries, decision guidance, verification rules, and reliability estimates. It further introduces reflection-weighted value backfilling, which propagates sparse terminal feedback through dense local self-reflections to produce evidence-calibrated trace values for governing memory and skill evolution. Experiments on EvoAgentBench and LoCoMo demonstrate that MSCE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art skill-augmented and memory-driven agent baselines, exhibiting strong cross-domain transferability and lifelong-evolution capabilities.

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